


In another life

by orphan_account



Category: Leverage
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Extras, Cryptojudaism, F/M, Masks, Names, Perfume, Purim
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 04:41:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1332292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It shouldn't surprise him that the real name she tells him is but a mask of her true name.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In another life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ariestess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariestess/gifts).



Of all the secrets she keeps, this is the deepest one. All of her other secrets, even her name, she’d given to him. This, this Nate has to piece together for himself.

In retrospect, her name is the first piece of this puzzle. For the longest time it remains just a name to him - even after they leave, even though she wears his ring on her finger. It’s a name, not particularly common and not particularly rare; it’s only special because it belongs to her.

There’s this perfume she gets in the habit of wearing, though, now that their lives are mostly their own. She always wears perfume, but this particular one drives home just how much the perfumes she usually wears are but another part of her mask, chosen to complement whichever disguise she chooses to wear. This perfume, though, this is for her; it belongs with the name that is a breathed secret between them.

Nate is no perfumer, but he can identify some of the notes, myrrh and frankincense, cinnamon and resin; and something else, something sweet, that slips between his memories. In his mind it is the scent of a white flower - but what white flower, he doesn’t know.

He doesn’t know what flower the woman he loves wear.

He gets into gardening. He finds out. And what he finds out rings a bell inside of his mind. It’s funny, how easily the memory comes back of a story he hasn’t heard since childhood. He does remember, though; he remembers the story of a woman who bore both names, the name of the flower and the name of the woman who wears its scent.

These two clues fell into his lap. No: one he earned. The other, he thinks, was given to him on trust, or perhaps on hope: she would have not given it to him by _accident._

He has a choice, now that he knows. And he chooses to not remain in debt. Knowing the shape of what he’s chasing, he writes down every date she had ever claimed for her birthday, and looks them up. The dates line up: they’re all the same date once he’s got his calendar right, once he remembers to count from dusk and not from midnight.

He knows, now, that she began running before she became a grifter; or perhaps she became a grifter so she could run. He has an idea as to why she might have started running. He has an idea of why she’s always been more likely to choose to live in North America, for as long as he’s known her - or of her - despite that she still insists on holding on to the mannerisms of the Old World.

He wonders how to tell her that he knows without saying too much, without speaking too loudly.

He gets lucky with the sliding of calendars that year. He has to call in a few favors but he has enough money and all the right connections, and Eliot doesn’t ask why Nate needs him to hop on a plane and retrieve something that Nate didn’t even steal.

Then comes the nerve-wrecking ten days of knowing, absolutely knowing, that she knows he’s hiding something and doesn’t know what, doesn’t know if she would do better to be eager or suspicious.

Then finally comes the day when he can go out and buy all of her favorite sweets, dark chocolate and fresh toffee and macaroons light and sweet like a kiss. He sets them next to the carnival mask on the counter, pours them both red wine - which he did steal, because it does make her happy, that he does that - and waits for the woman he loves to come out of her bath wearing the scents of the flower that is her _real_ real name, not the one she’d told him but the one she will not breathe out, not even in bed, not even when she wears nothing but her skin and this scent.

She steps out of the bathroom of the studio apartment they presently live in, and stops dead in her tracks, one hand still in her damp hair.

“Nate, what is meaning of all this?” she asks.

“I like your perfume,” he says, to ease her into this. He pauses as she approaches. “Myrtle, right?”

And yes, yes, he was right about everything.

Her eyes brush over the wine and the sweets, and pause on the mask. She lifts it gently, reverently almost.

Only when she puts the mask against her face and ties the ribbon does he know that he’s been allowed in.

“Happy Purim,” he says, and adds the name that has so far been left silent, the name that she must wear a mask to bear, her true name: “Hadassah.”


End file.
